In November 2011, the journal Psychiatric Services published a review of Unhinged written by Jeffrey Geller, MD, MPH. Dr. Geller calls Unhinged “an autobiographical coming-of-age account in psychiatry at the turn of the 20th century, much as David Viscott’s The Making of a Psychiatrist was the coming-of-age story of psychiatry for the end of the 1960s.” You can read the review here: http://ps.psychiatryonline.org/article.aspx?articleid=179894

Chetan Haldipur, MD, recently wrote a review of Unhinged for Psychiatric Times. In his review he writes,“Unhinged is, strictly speaking, neither a memoir nor a polemic. Rather, it is something in between—more like investigative journalism.”

The July 14, 2011 issue of The New York Review of Books includes the second of a two-part review of several new books on the topic of psychiatry, including Unhinged. Review author Marcia Angel, Senior Lecturer in Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and former Editor in Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, calls Unhinged “absorbing” in her article “The Illusions of Psychiatry,” where she also explores Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs, Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic, and the DSM-5.

Dr. Richard Evans, Director of Mental Health Services at Volunteers in Medicine (VIM), in Great Barrington, Mass., recently reviewed Unhinged for MIWatch, a mental illness news website. Dr. Evans, a practicing psychiatrist himself, writes about the state of our field:

For now we will most likely hobble along within a market-based model with fragmentation of care for both those in the public health system with major mental illness and those like Dr. Carlat’s patients who are less ill, have decent health insurance and can afford drug treatment and psychotherapy. Those who see doctors like him will be fortunate, receiving trustworthy guidance in a system where trust has become a precious commodity.

James Jefferson, MD, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, recently wrote a review of Unhinged in the August 2010 issue of Clinical Psychiatry News, a newspaper for psychiatrists. Dr. Jefferson is up front about his status as a paid promotional speaker for pharmaceutical companies. Nonetheless, he writes an interesting and balanced review. You can read it here: Unhinged Review in Clin Psych News

The Huffington Post, one of the nation’s leading online news sources, published a review of Unhinged on Thursday, May 27. Blogger Kaitlin Bell’s article, What is a Psychiatrist, Anyway? discusses the book and explores how some patients may feel about incorporating more therapy into visits with their psychiatrists. (And maybe she would know: According to her bio, Bell is writing a book for Beacon Press about “her generation’s experience growing up on psychiatric medications.”)

Unhinged is now available for purchase! I’ve been making the rounds on local and national radio programs, discussing the book and the state of psychiatry. Visit our News page for links to many of my interviews.

You can buy Unhinged at most bookstores as well as any of the online retailers listed on this page.

Unhinged will not be officially released until May 18, but for a preview, read my article, “Mind over Meds,” in this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. In the article, I focus on one of the topics covered in Unhinged—namely, the abandonment of psychological mindedness by psychiatrists. When I went into psychiatry, I did so because I was fascinated by the mind. But what I encountered during training was a field that was hypnotized by the idea that psychiatry is primarily a medical, rather than a psychological specialty. Rather than understanding people, the goal of psychiatry had become diagnosing disorders, and matching disorders up with medications to treat symptoms. I had assumed I would become a psychotherapist who also prescribed medications when needed. Instead, I was trained to become a psychopharmacologist. When a patient needed therapy, I learned how to figure which therapist to refer the patient to, rather than how to actually do that therapy. I believe this is one of the central crises facing psychiatry today.

If you see a psychiatrist, ask yourself whether he or she really understands you as a person. Does your psychiatrist know what makes you tick? How much have you learned about yourself, about your needs, your goals, and how to attain happiness? Some psychiatrists do, in fact, provide the entire package of medication plus psychotherapy. If you are lucky enough to have found someone like that, you are unusual, because the latest research shows that only 10% of psychiatrists offer therapy to all their patients. Instead, most of us split up the treatment, prescribing medications during 15 to 20 minute visits, and farming the therapy out to a social worker or a psychologist.

It is as though we are splitting our patients into two people. One is a soup of neurotransmitters, and the other is a person. For some patients, this split treatment model works fine, but for many patients it causes fragmentation of care, and that’s not good treatment. As professionals, we can do much better than that.